Seeing that I am so inspired by icebergs, I thought I might relate my fascination into some sort of “practical” application for my exploration with thermochromic ink. The connection was obvious to me: body heat makes the ink disappear (supposedly), icebergs are disappearing, human activity is causing them to disappear, SO therefore screen print icebergs onto a tshirt so that the body heat of the human wearing the shirt will cause the icebergs to “disappear.” With me so far??

I am by no means an expert in silkscreening (in fact, to be honest, this is my first attempt in years, and likely only my second or third attempt ever) so it was a bit of a learning process. I began with a “stencil”:After carefully applying the stencil to the screen (yes, for those of you looking carefully, that is obama in the background). Then, the lovely Annabelle helped me prepare the ink mixture and set up for my practice rounds of silkscreening.

My first two practice passes didn’t work out perfectly, but I decided to go for it on the tshirt the third time. This may have been a mistake. The actual silkscreening didn’t work out perfectly, which was a little disappointing, but I managed to fill in the parts that didn’t work with a paintbrush instead. The message is the same, the image is the same, it’s just the method that didn’t work as I had hoped. Oh well.

Here’s how it turned out:

Obviously, as soon as the ink dried I was eager to see how it would disappear. The results were also a little disappointing in that sense as well. The black ink I used faded to grey instead of disappearing. Others in the class who used the magenta ink eperienced more success in having desired aspects disappear with body temperature. If I were to do it again (with access to any colour of ink that would actually completely disappear) I would use a blue ink on a white shirt again. I think the blue reads better as icebergs than black, but hey, you make the most of what you have, right?I like the idea of secret messages being hidden within our clothing as we wear them throughout the day. Ideally, these icebergs would disappear completely and only the person wearing the shirt would know they were there once their body heat “melted” the icebergs. As a person gets dressed each morning, perhaps their clothing could contain reminders (one of climate change, for example) that they see as they pull it out of the closet or off the shelf. Perhaps our clothing could contain secret messages, quiet reminders, or images that are special to us that only we can see. Perhaps this serves no true “purpose” in the eyes of many. So what?